most melodic manner I’ve seen in ages. The jour-
ney is magical and funky. I applaud him.”
In his novels De Mojo Blues (2002) and Another
Good Loving Blues (1994) as well as his children’s
book Cleveland Lee’s Beale Street Band 1996),
Flowers presents the blues as major “characters”
as well as a major entity within black culture. The
blues shape Lucas Bodeen’s perception of himself
in Another Good Loving Blues, help him express
the range of emotions he experiences in his love
relationship with Melvira Dupree, and reflect the
changes taking place within the black community
at the end of the 20th century. In Flowers’s chil-
dren’s story, only after young Cleveland Lee learns
from an old bluesman how to play trumpet from
his heart does he gain the skills required to catch
the attention of the whole city of Memphis and
perform in his sister’s marching band.
Flowers also amplifies the writing magic, the
“literary hoodoo” tradition, pioneered by ZORA
NEALE HURSTON and ISHMAEL REED, a tradition
that, he believes, is another way of shaping and
empowering the black community. He describes
himself as a modern-day literary hoodoo practi-
tioner in his memoir Mojo Rising: Confessions of a
21st Century Conjureman, and his other works are
populated by practitioners of these magical arts as
well. In Flower’s first novel, De Mojo Blues, protag-
onist Tucept High John trains as a “hoodoo” prac-
titioner in a wilderness park in Memphis. With his
new skills, he is able to save himself and his former
Vietnam War comrades even as he tries to rescue
the larger black community. Author Wesley Brown
described the novel as “a meditation on tradition,
destiny, and the exercise of mojo (power) as a heal-
ing force in a world poised for destruction.”
Lucas Bodeen shares his love with conjure/hoo-
doo woman Melvira Dupree in Another Good Lov-
ing Blues. She, in turn, is encouraged by Hootowl,
the older hoodoo, to adapt to the challenges facing
black people in the big cities, such as Memphis,
during the Great Migration and to use her pow-
ers to strengthen African Americans to perform
the spiritwork needed no matter where they live.
In one scene Flowers brings Melvira face to face
with Zora Neale Hurston, the literary genius and
trained anthropologist who studied and wrote
about hoodoo and the roots worker/spiritual prac-
titioner in Mules and Men. The two women size
each other up and silently agree that each has the
power necessary to shape the souls of a people.
A veteran of the war in Vietnam, Flowers is a
blues singer and a performance artist who per-
forms both his own work and classics from black
culture, such as “Shine and the Titanic.” “Shine
and the Titanic” is perhaps one of the best known
toasts, a genre, like rapping, SIGNIFYING, and boast,
that is central to African-American oral culture.
It offers another (vernacular) version of the his-
torical sinking of the Titanic, which took place
in 1912, a historical period colored by Jim Crow
laws of “separate but equal.” Denied passage in the
segregated world of this super luxury liner other
than as a laborer, Shine, a stoker on the Titanic, be-
comes aware of the impending danger, the loom-
ing icebergs, and inevitable damage and loss of
lives should the ship continue forward. Although
he warns Captain Smith, who is drunk with the
magnificence of the ship, its passengers, and its
maiden voyage, the captain ignores Shine’s warn-
ings and, verbally at least, demands that Shine re-
member and remain in his subordinate status and
place. Shine, who is a good swimmer, swims to
safety as the Titanic sinks, turning a deaf ear to the
privileged voyagers to whom he had been invisible.
He was not, in the end, among the privileged pas-
sengers who, despite their wealth and status, lost
their lives when the Titanic went down.
Flowers, a modern-day conjure man, teaches at
Syracuse University and is a cofounder of the New
Renaissance Writer’s Guild. His weblog, called
“Rootwork the Rootsblog: A Cyberhoodoo Web-
space,” can be found at http://rootsblog.typepad.
com/rootsblog/2003/10/.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Wesley. Quoted in Review of De Mojo Blues,
Chicken Bones. A Journal of Literary and Artistic
African American Themes (Fall 2002). Available
online. URL: http://www.nathanielturner.com/
demojoblues.htm. Accessed February 14, 2007.
Dance, Daryl Cumber, ed. From My People: 400 Years
of African-American Folklore. N e w Yo r k : W. W.
Norton & Co., 2002.Flowers, Arthur 187